It is an anomaly that The Story of Hunadi, a novel written by Soweto-based writer Mokoka Klaas Mashishi, was rejected by local publishers only to be taken up by Eloquent Books, a publisher in the United States that seems to do what is sometimes described as Âvanity publishing.
Adding to the disquiet and irony is the fact that the story, about a rural black girl who falls in love with the son of a white farmer, is the kind that may once have attracted the attention of apartheid South Africa’s censors.
The 1950s story is set near important landmarks: there is the Kedi River and what black people call the Mountain of the Ancestors, “the spiritual centre of the people of ÂMangenaneng” (the Afrikaners call it ÂDuiwelskoppie).
The mountain is where different philosophies about land do battle: a few Afrikaner businessmen want to turn the place into a tourist resort, whereas black people consider it a sacred area where they pray to the ancestors (British empire builder Cecil John Rhodes, coincidentally, is buried in the sacred Matopos Hills close to ÂBulawayo, Zimbabwe).
In the vicinity of the pristine mountain are Nuwe Jerusalem, Dagbreek and Rooifontein experimental farms, the last of the land “that was once the pasturage of the villagers”. There are advanced plans to move the people from their ancestral land; in fact, the area’s chief, Kgosi Michael Mangenane, has been Âbanished to the Orange Free State.
Crossing the divide
The novel is in many ways anthropological. Describing it thus is no slight because Africa’s best-known work, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, can, after all, be read as a work of anthropology.
The main characters in The Story of Hunadi (could the publisher not find a more imaginative title?) are, on one side of the divide, Andries Kruis, his son, Gerrit (Reti), and Sello and his twin sister, Hunadi; on the other there are Dr Koekemoer, Dominee Teens and his successor, Pels, and a police officer, Captain Berkstroom.
Quite early in the novel Andries’s wife dies and he asks a black woman, Mme Mmakgati, to raise his son Gerrit — something that riles the local Afrikaner community.
“A white baby brought up in a bantu home, that’s unpardonable. It should not be allowed,” someone says. So the community sends a deputation to Ârescue the poor white child from ”bantuization” (this is a word from the book; I did not make it up).
The close-knit community would have been up in arms if it knew that Kruis on occasion drinks Âtraditional African beer and has embraced African wisdom (when justifying his son being raised by his African domestic worker, Kruis says “as the farm workers say, one should never ignore the wishes of a dying person”). Kruis’s visceral Ârelationship with the land and his immediate environment evokes Dick Turner in The Grass Is Singing by Doris ÂLessing.
Kruis dismisses the delegation and assaults one of their number. He contemplates that he “was brought up by a native woman and that had not changed him from being a white farmer”. Of course, that is an oblique way of saying a not often mentioned fact: the black matriarch is the mother of the nation.
But the racial literalists, some of them members of the Broederbond, come up with a plan to resist “bantuization”. Reti will be entrusted to a chaplain at a Pretoria agricultural college and prevented from visiting the farm “until we are satisfied that we have changed him into a proper Afrikaner boy”.
The right ingredients
It is not only Reti who goes to Pretoria. His best friend, Sello, also goes there for further education (his school fees are paid by Reti’s father). The journey enables Sello and other villagers brought up in enclosed, idyllic spaces to come into close contact with the rough city where “most of the laws — were meant to trap black people”.
In this chapter we meet the “‘Clevers’ in Âfloral shirts, Florsheim shoes and sunglasses” and political types (one mysteriously called The Old Man).
There are ingredients for this to be a very good story: there is the sacred mountain and legends, love affairs, murders and miscegenation. These elements, combined with ambition and bitterness and unrequited love that turns into hatred, make for Âmoving reading at times.
Yet the book needs more work. There is the dense yet indeterminate characterisation, the anthropological feel of the novel, the way ÂMashishi holds up archeological artefacts in ways that threaten to overwhelm Âcertain parts of the story.
The novel takes place over a few decades, but you never quite get the sense that the characters born early in the book have become adults by the final chapter. Then there are the sudden, jagged transitions from one episode to the next — and then the standard diction in which the book is written.
When you read Things Fall Apart, you get a sense of a kind of English that is far removed from its ancestral home in the British Isles. Apart from a few instances, one in which a mother says “the children have no ears”, the language is domesticated. All these are lapses that a good South African editor would have corrected, but let me rush to say why the book was turned down.
Compelling narrative
Two readers, both accomplished literary scholars at Wits University, praised the novel. One said it was a “wonderful epic story”, “gripping and readable, [offering] acute analyses and new social histories”. The second said he thought it was “a fine novel. It is quite evident to me that a great deal of work has gone into its conception, composition and editing. I find the narrative compelling, the issues and themes that are raised timely and persuasive, and the characterisation thorough and convincing.”
Yet publisher after publisher turned down the book. One large publisher rejected it without even giving reasons; another wrote that “we focus on a contemporary interpretation of South African realities and are not likely to accept your work for further consideration if it is confined to portraying the South Africa of the Fifties”. This seems to be a pro forma rejection: I know of another manuscript rejected using the selfsame words.
A third publisher commented that although there were many “positives” about the novel, it felt that “this particular story does not have the broad-based reader appeal that the contemporary market demands. In the current climate [we] are having to be very stringent about our selection process, particularly when it comes to novels.” Again, this is a formulaic rejection.
Four other publishers offered reasons why they would not take on the book, but the overwhelming one seemed to be the book’s perceived lack of contemporaneity.
Delicate and well-wrought noveL
Perhaps the required contemporaneity is one that is totally forgetful of South Africa’s immediate past, one that does not glance sideways or backwards as it stares intently at the present.
I found the book contemporary enough; the novel’s themes are relevant today. The bitter legacies of the 1950s are still with us — the young continue to disagree with the old, women continue to be burned because they have been pointed out as witches and millions of rural dwellers continue to move to the Âcities.
It is sad — an injustice, even — that a delicate and well-wrought novel, a book that would have benefited from being published locally, languishes in exile.